Healthy job growth and millions in new investment dollars have combined to make Nashville one of the nation’s top apartment boom towns, according to a new report.

And yet all that growth hasn’t yet made made a major dent in the city’s near record-high rental rates.

“(Nashville is) gaining people, and it’s got pretty good income and GDP growth,” said Elizabeth Whalen, a data journalist whose analysis covered data for the 100 most populous U.S. metro areas from 2009 through 2013. She conducted the analysis for SpareFoot, an Austin, Texas-based online marketplace for self-storage facilities.

About 3,000 new units were completed last year, while an additional 7,777 remained under construction at year-end. Meanwhile, 6,000 more units are planned, although permits and financing still remain as hurdles for the newest units, according to data from the Greater Nashville Apartment Association.

“We’ve had a lot of new supply,” said Woody McLaughlin, a member of the association’s statistics committee, who wasn’t surprised by the ranking.

The brisk building activity has led to concerns about potential overbuilding, but McLaughlin cites stable vacancy and growing rents among the signs of a balanced market. “The market is taking it and as long as job growth continues at this pace, the market is absorbing the new units,” he said, adding there’s no sign of owners offering concessions or freebies to get units leased.

The average apartment rent in the Nashville area was $882 in the fourth quarter of 2013, just shy of the $892 average for the third quarter, which was the highest ever rate recorded by the Greater Nashville Apartment Association.

Occupancy rates also rose slightly, to 95.66 percent, in the fourth quarter, the highest level since the mid-1990s, according to the group, which tracks apartment rates in several local communities, including Nashville, Mt. Juliet, Lebanon and Murfreesboro.

The market is attracting money from out-of-town investors looking to invest in growing markets. Late last month, for instance, an affiliate of a Los Angeles-based private investment firm purchased the 278-unit Spinnaker Cove Apartments in Hermitage for $24.75 million. That is just the latest in a string of deals for Nashville-area apartment complexes, observers say. In 2013, the five largest apartment deals in the Nashville area totaled $260 million.

Income on rise

The Nashville area’s population has grown an average of 1.5 percent per year, according to SpareFoot’s analysis of three years’ worth of data through 2012.

During that period, real, inflation-adjusted GDP grew 2.9 percent, while average per capita personal income rose 2.4 percent from 2009 to 2011. From 2011 to 2013, average growth in per capita construction permits for new apartments was 77 percent, while the percentage of people here spending more than 35 percent of their incomes on rent for 2012 inflation adjusted was 41 percent.

San Jose, Calif., ranked No. 1 overall among America’s Top 15 Apartment Boom Towns, followed by the Texas cities of Austin and Houston and Grand Rapids, Mich.

In specific categories, Nashville ranked sixth for average per capita GDP growth, 13th for average growth in per capita personal income, 17th for average population growth, and 28th for average growth in per capita construction permits for new apartments. It ranked 56th for apartments per person — 124,000 units for a population of 1.73 million. The percentage of people here spending more than 35 percent of their income on rent was 41 percent. The last category indicates affordability — the lower the number, the better.